I just want to share something.
I recently had a conversation with a meditation teacher who is a student of Beth Upton. They follow the Pa-Auk tradition, and I’ve also watched many of Beth’s videos.
Here’s the key insight: just love your breath. Observe it gently. If it feels shallow, that’s okay—just note that it’s shallow. If you can’t feel its touch, don’t worry—simply love your breath. For now, just know it as it is.
When you start loving your breath instead of trying hard to focus or chase nimitta, you’ll naturally forget your surroundings, and deep meditation will happen by itself. There’s no need to force anything—just keep loving your breath.
Eventually, you’ll begin to feel the point of contact where the breath touches, and from that spot, the nimitta will arise. So, don’t make nimitta your goal.
Your only goal is to lovingly and mindfully know the breath
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Generally speaking, never chase after your object.
The VSM has it all.
Suppose a ploughman, after doing some ploughing, sent his oxen free to graze and sat down to rest in the shade. Then his oxen would soon go into the forest. Now, a skilled ploughman who wants to catch them and yoke them again does not wander through the forest following their tracks, but rather he takes his rope and goad and goes straight to the drinking place where they meet, and he sits or lies there.
Then after the oxen have wandered about for a part of the day, they come to the drinking place where they meet, and they bathe and drink. When he sees that they have come out and are standing about, he secures them with the rope, and prodding them with the goad, he brings them back, yokes them, and goes on with his ploughing.
So too, the bhikkhu should not look for the in-breaths and out-breaths anywhere else than the place normally touched by them. He should take the rope of mindfulness and the goad of understanding, and fixing his mind on the place normally touched by them, he should go on giving his attention to that.
For as he gives his attention in this way, they reappear after no long time, as the oxen did at the drinking place where they met. So he can secure them with the rope of mindfulness, and yoking them in that same place and prodding them with the goad of understanding, he can keep on applying himself to the meditation subject.
Loving the object can also be taken ambiguously. So need to be careful.
One should be like a gatekeeper and not pay too much attention to the objects going in and out.
This is the simile of the gatekeeper: Just as a gatekeeper does not examine people inside and outside the town, asking, “Who are you? Where have you come from? Where are you going? What have you got in your hand?”—for those people are not his concern—but he does examine each man as he arrives at the gate, so too, the incoming breaths that have gone inside and the outgoing breaths that have gone outside are not this bhikkhu’s concern, but they are his concern each time they arrive at the [nostril] gate itself.
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